


be not afraid

by noun



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 08:24:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19970989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: It is easier, in the dark, to ask without speaking. She lays her hand on his shoulder, and he tilts his head to look up at her, his eyes the briefest spark in the otherwise lightless room. She can feel the tightness of wound muscle under her fingers as she crawls down to the joining of skin to feather along his back. The wings tremble as he breathes, but he skips one exhale as she runs her hand down like she would stroke a horse’s flank.





	be not afraid

**Author's Note:**

> Found a thumbdrive from my Assassin's Creed days, cleaning up a few stories for posting.

Maria considers what she will find under her tunic once she removes it. If nothing else, there will be bruises no worse than the ones she received from Robert when he’d taught her how to properly handle a sword. Her back took the worst of it in the fall, and riding tomorrow will be hell, but this is not a particularly worrisome state for her to be in. She has withstood greater injuries.  
  
The worst wound is intangible: to her pride. What Bouchart did will not easily be put to bed, or as quick to fade as the mottled bruises.  
  
She removes the tunic to do away with the suspense, and turns her head to look at her companion.  
  
Of the two of them, Altaïr is worse off. He stands in the other corner of the room, and Maria watches as he hesitates a press of his fingers at a spot along his ribs through his robes, only to yank them away, hissing.  
  
“Are they broken?” she asks. The removed tunic hangs limp from her fingers, temporarily inconvenient.  
  
He jerks his head up, her presence apparently forgotten in the handful of time since he’d brought her to his bolt hole in Cyprus.  
  
“Bruised,” he says. “I will heal.”  
  
Where the Templars promise individual glory, the Assassins favor submission to the Creed; the cowl hides his face, renders him anonymous; just one more man in Assassin white.  
  
Maria thinks the polish of him wore off once his blade had faltered upon realization of her sex. Now, he was _Altaïr_ , with all that entailed, the sweet and the bitter.  
  
“Let me help,” she says. “I aided Robert with his armor many times, surely your robes cannot be as complicated.”  
  
Altaïr shies away, half-turns his back, but his protest is ineffective; Maria reaches him quickly. He would only raise a blade to her in defense of his life, she knows, not because she is dismissive of his shyness in the face of injury. She understands his sore spot when it comes to her now in the same way she thinks she would be able to pick him out in a crowd of other Assassins from his presence alone. They are comrades, in a way.  
  
So, she presses on.  
  
She overpowers him now with a hand on his shoulder and the push it in to turn him to face her.  
  
The hood lifts easily from his head. She puts it on the low table that holds a basin of water, and drops her tunic beside it. And then she stops. His face is hers to study, in the half-light. She notices the tight cropping of his hair, the scatterings of the beginning of a beard, and the scar that splits his lip.  
  
He parts them to speak, but she’s faster.  
  
“I see being kicked in the face failed to make you less pretty,” she says, and finds the ties on the shoulder of his robes.  
  
“Maria,” he says. He wets his lips, but says no more.  
  
“What?” she says, and finds his hand closed around her wrist, the missing finger an empty space in the hold. He looks straight at her, his golden eyes inscrutable.  
  
He turns his face from her, and releases her hand. The ties are simple—already, the knots yield to her fingers, but she gives him the space to declare whatever he thought important, and when he does not—  
  
“You are a strange man,” she chides, and finishes undoing the robes. She just needs to see his ribs, not the whole of him, and they ought to be equal in vulnerability, with her stripped down to her breast band and his chest bare.  
  
The linen yields, falls off his shoulders and drops limp about his waist, yet held up by his belt and sash, and at first, she wonders what purpose is served by having a black cloak beneath the robes. But the half-light has betrayed her again. They are too soft under the brief brush of her finger to be even silk, and as Altaïr inhales (winces, from the pain to his ribs) they swell, stretching as they unfold to nearly fill the room.  
  
There had been an angel in her mother's book of hours, rendered in the margins, each feather a thin line of ink, the wings in an awkward thrust from the body, confined both by the artist’s talent and the space allowed them. The mosaic in the Bethlehem chapel had been finer, the feathers blue and yellow and in more glorious detail than the miniature, and even Robert had remarked upon it.  
  
Altaïr's wings are neither miniature nor many-colored. They soaked up all the light in the room and defied containment.  
  
There were rumors. Always, rumors of the Assassins, of the death they brought, of their inhuman feats; why they could jump from heights that would kill any other man, their miraculous escapes, the murder they dealt from above. Robert had considered many explanations for their abilities in his meetings; the common conclusion among the men was that they were demons. Suitable, for the holy land.  
  
This is just as divine.  
  
Maria reaches out, caught in the wonder. Her outstretched fingers hang between them, until  
Altaïr says, “Maria,” and she yanks them back.  
  
She finds her words despite a dry mouth.

“Is this the great secret of the Assassins, then?”  
  
They fold back slowly, the primaries nearly brushing the floor. She thinks, wildly, that even as large as they had been in the cramped space, they had not yet been at full span.  
  
“… yes,” Altaïr admits. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and glances at the window behind her. The dried blood on his skin is flaked, the cuts and scrapes ultimately shallow.  
  
Maria holds her words in her mouth, and chooses.  
  
“Sit,” she says, and reaches for a clean rag. “Before we lose the last of the light.”  
  
It is not her first step down the road to Masyaf, but it is the first one she is conscious of.  
  
After, once he has been seen to and the night creeps into the room, once the bandages have been put away and Altaïr sits compliant on the bed, she stops batting her curiosity away.  
  
It is easier, in the dark, to ask without speaking. She lays her hand on his shoulder, and he tilts his head to look up at her, his eyes the briefest spark in the otherwise lightless room. She can feel the tightness of wound muscle under her fingers as she crawls down to the joining of skin to feather along his back. The wings tremble as he breathes, but he skips one exhale as she runs her hand down like she would stroke a horse’s flank.  
  
His hand snaps out, and she thinks she’s pushed too much into irritation, but when she meets his gaze, his lips are parted and he looks at her with too bare an expression, too vulnerable.  
  
He lays her down in an Assassin bolt hole in Limassol. Her tailbone is bruised from a hard fall and his ribs a mass of purple and green, his stomach uninterrupted smoothness, no navel. They kiss first, come together suddenly, her hands closed around his wrists even as they move from the clumsy mash of lips into the fluidity of understanding, of Altaïr’s prick a hardening lump at her hip.  
  
This antediluvian creature, this man who she privately marvels over even as all mystery is stripped from him, turns out to be as impatient as she is. He yanks at her hose, enough to get it tangled about her knees, enough space for him to slide between her legs and sheathe himself inside her. He moves in a lurch, and the wings rise once more, the left stunted by the wall that the rugs and pillows are stacked against, but still glorious, glorious, a canopy of feathers around them.

* * *

The road to Masyaf becomes much more literal come morning. There are the practicalities; finding mounts, supplies, and then there is considering how her presence might be explained. The red cross is picked from her cloak easily enough and the threads making it discarded along the road, and Robert’s ring she tucks away, but she is undeniably foreign, Crusader, even with how the road has weathered her skin and manner.

In the end, they decide upon nothing, and ride into the gates of Masyaf as if they are equally entitled to it. Altaïr is, at least, as Mentor. Maria keeps a scarf wrapped about her hair and keeps her mount close to his.  
  
Her first sight of the fortress is of both the peaks and the strange birds in the skies.  
  
Maria has become (intimately) acquainted with Altaïr’s wings, initial wonder washed away by routine into plain curiosity, and then rote awareness. But the practicalities, what it might look like in a place where such a thing is not a secret—where such things are hardly unique—  
  
The figures in the sky are human.  
  
The scouts meet them, descending out of the sky like pigeons alighting on a wall, and stand. Maria notes how young they look, how scruffy their half-grown beards attempt to add years.  
  
“Mentor,” one says, to Altaïr, and sketches a hasty bow. “We did not expect to see you by the road—”  
  
On his horse, Altaïr says nothing, and the speaker receives a curt elbow to his side. The second pipes up.  
  
“Should we let the Dai know of your return?”  
  
“Yes,” Altaïr says. When they shift from foot to foot, he says, “go,” to rather immediate effect, as they leap off the ground before their wings snap out to help push off.  
  
“The whole fortress will know within ten minutes,” he grumbles, and Maria nudges her horse to walk alongside his, rather than behind.  
  
“We could race,” Maria offers. Her mount is dancing at the prospect of a stable, and she suspects she might be able to coax a final sprint from her, especially against Altaïr’s gelding.  
  
To his credit, he does appear to consider the idea before shaking his head.  
  
“No,” he says. “But we will not walk, either.”  
  
He pulls his hood down, and rolls his shoulders. Maria hasn’t come to entirely understand how he tucks them so neatly against his back, nor how they can slip through the layers of his robes, but his wings emerge. Where the scouts were like sparrows, he wears his own like a badge of office, half, extended.  
  
The gelding seems uneasy.  
  
“Come along, then,” Maria says, moving forward. “I have had enough of stories. I would make everyone from them real, if this is to be my home.”  
  
The civilians make way before them, women carrying baskets nimbly avoiding them, men seated against walls standing, a path clearing up the mountain as they go. Altaïr may not have been joking when he said everyone would know so quickly—there is gossip in the crowd that starts to gather, the closer they get to the fortress proper, but looks center on Maria, Maria in her boots and breeches with her head held high. Altaïr earns inclined heads, averted gazes; Maria has stares.  
  
It is nothing new.  
  
They pass the fortresses’ gates, and Altaïr dismounts, the wings making it an easy leap. With her horse’s bridle in his hands, he offers her his other to help her down, which she takes despite the urge to protest.  
  
A young man—a boy, in truth, for his Assassin whites—runs forward to take them. He too—like every man in the courtyard, every man watching them—dares to look her in the eye. Altaïr’s head snaps immediately to scold without words, and the boy ducks his head, and hurried the horses.  
  
In the dust of the courtyard, near the training circle, where the man leading it has put a stop to the swordplay, there are downy tufts of discarded feather. Every man she can see, child to withered elder, is as Altaïr is. Angelic? No, she will not say that, even in her own mind. Winged, then; a qualification for being in the Brotherhood. She will stare as greedily as they do, take it all in, the variety, the shapes. There is a tension in the air. They expect Altaïr to speak, she thinks, explain her, but the rules of hierarchy are as they were in the Order. No one here can demand information from him.  
  
Perhaps he only wishes to let them drink their fill of the sight of her.  
  
At the door leading into the castle, a man emerges, the starkness of his black djellaba standing out against all the while and grey, the white design on the side beyond her unsteady ken of what certain Assassin attire signals. He stops at the end of the stairs, and calls out across the distance, his voice carrying easily.  
  
“Mentor, Masyaf is yours. How fared your travels?”  
  
“Cyprus is cleared of Templar interference,” Altaïr returns. He pauses, to allow for the pleased shouts echoing around those in earshot. “And I have returned with my wife, Maria.”  
  
Once more, a commotion, sentences said to neighbors, started and left unfinished, too far from her for Maria to pick out any particular thread or threat.  
  
They will speak later, on the matrimony aspect, but did she expect anything different?  
  
“There is food waiting,” the man says. “And many curious about your travels.”  
  
The man looks at her but for a moment, and then back to Altaïr, who acquiesces gracefully with an inclined head. When he begins to walk forward, Maria follows, mute, at his side.  
  
It is difficult not to fall into a step behind, to walk as she walked with Robert.  
  
At fifty paces, she realizes what is odd about the man and his robe—one sleeve is pinned up, half-empty. His wings are nearly as relaxed as Altaïr’s, the deep brown feathers like a cape about his shoulder, the white tips neat and clean. Something passes between Altaïr and the other man when they meet, some unspoken message, underwritten by whatever dynamic that he’d used to break the stillness of the courtyard and greet Altaïr.  
  
“My second,” he says, in a low voice, as they ascend. “Malik Al-Sayf.”  
  
“Safety and peace,” Malik says, something in his tone like grit in the flour. A great deal unsaid, she revises the holes in Altaïr’s stories clearly in the shape of this man.  
  
“You accomplished a great deal in Cyprus,” he says, and Altaïr inclines his head in the barest of nods.  
  
“Later,” Altaïr corrects.  
  
Malik holds back as they enter the castle, his shoulder shifting as he watches them walk by. Maria does not crane her neck to take in every detail, but the impulse is present as the full intricacies of Masyaf reveal themselves to her. She will have plenty of time to become acquainted with them. She would turn her head to look back at Malik, but Altaïr's pace is unyielding as he ascends the stairs, and turns for the tower. Her place is at his side, and she will take cover from the gauntlet, if only for a moment.

* * *

Three months after her arrival, when she can no longer attribute the lack of blood to travel and the feeling settled within her enough that she can tell Altaïr without fear of later disappointment, she goes not to him first, but his second. Malik is more easily reachable, set in a corner in the library, separate enough from the other scholars that they might have privacy, a rare treat within the walls of Masyaf.

And Malik does not occasionally bolt upon an opened door, something golden and shining tucked away into a sleeve.  
  
She slips behind the shelf into the alcove he has claimed for himself, the wide table with a half-completed map spread before him, the lines of the map slowly coalescing into borders, rivers. He glances up from his work, pausing to greet her with a small nod, quill lifted from parchment.  
  
“I’m with child,” she says, and Malik does not startle; sets the quill back down and draws in steady lines of ink.  
  
“Congratulations,” he says. “Altaïr’s?”  
  
“I hope,” she says, wry, and takes the bench by the window, turning to look out over the courtyard, at the novices sparring under Rauf’s tutelage.  
  
“He’ll be insufferable,” Malik notes. “Once he knows, which he does not, for he was bearable at breakfast. Why have you told me?”  
  
Maria thumbs at the hem of her tunic. “I have questions,” she admits, delicately.  
  
“Ask a woman,” Malik says.  
  
“Where?” she responds. “I have not seen any who are…” and in the absence of words, gestures instead, her attention drawn from Rauf and the clunking of practice swords.  
  
Malik’s hand pauses. His wings, draped gently around his shoulders and so dark as to blend in with the robes of his Dai’s coat, ruffle as if stirred by a breeze.  
  
“Ah,” he says, setting his quill to the side. “No, you would not.”  
  
“Is it not possible for women to be as you are?” she ventures.  
  
“No.” He stops to consider; amends. “Or, yes. Al Mualim had them killed.”  
  
He says this as bluntly as everything else he’s said to her.  
  
“You have seen the gardens, behind the wall?” he asks. She nods. “They lived there. It is the Brotherhood, they did not know how to fight. Access was a reward for successful missions, or as it pleased Al Mualim. When the rewards stopped, no one thought to question him, as foul of a mood as he was in. ”  
  
He picks up the quill once more. “But it is why there are no small children underfoot. Yours will be the first in a while. You should go tell Altaïr. As I said, he will be insufferable about it.”  
  
Maria makes a noise of agreement, and lingers.  
  
Malik’s quill scratches against the parchment for a few minutes longer, the silence between them disintegrating slowly. She feels the satisfaction radiate off him as he finishes the section, and watches as he puts his tools away slowly, one hand doing the work of two.  
  
“What were your questions?” he asks, finally. She sits up.  
  
“The wings,” she says, because it always comes back to that. “It seems as though they would make it more complicated-”  
  
Malik interrupts.  
  
“Eggs,” he cuts in. “But of course, he would not have thought to tell you, nor would have anyone else.”  
  
“Eggs,” Maria says, sure her understanding of the language (learned in the camps along the way, accented and built on the vocabulary of soldiers) has failed her.  
  
“Yes, like hawks.” After a moment of thought, he amends his words. “Or a chicken, considering him. Go,” he says, and waves her off. “It is joyous news. Then return to me with your practical questions.”  
  
“Thank you,” she says, standing.  
  
“Wait,” as she turns. He sits, handiwork spread before him. “Why me?”  
  
Maria shrugs. “You are the Dai, and he speaks highly of you.”  
  
Malik considers, and makes the same gesture for her to go. She will ignore the softening of the corners of his mouth for the sake of his pride.

* * *

The smell of smoke is thick enough to have its own weight, and the conversation is low enough to give only the shape of words. Maria enters anyway; she is the Mentor’s wife and an Englishwoman. Propriety has never bothered to suit her and there will be some who suck their teeth at whatever she does. It has lessened, as the pregnancy has become more apparent and she’s exchanged her clothes for a mishmash of local garb, though she clings to clothes easy to move in even as she is barred from the practice yard by good sense and the advice of the local midwife.  
  
And no one capable of eliciting a laugh from Altaïr will mind her presence.  
  
The smoke rising from the lazily burning resin clouds the air but does not obscure the sight overmuch. She recognizes Malik’s stark black coat thrown over a chair first, and then Altaïr on the cushions, stretched out over them like a cat, his wings flaccid, draped over floor and fabric both. His chin rests on folded arms, his long legs extended such that she must step over them to come further in, cautious in not disturbing him and unsure of her new center of gravity.

Malik’s dark eyes meet hers, but Altaïr does not bother turning his head. Malik’s hand has fistfuls of his feathers, which he releases as Maria settles in beside him, the hem of her robe brushing against Malik’s knee as she reaches past him to the plate from the kitchens that Altaïr has arranged next to his head.

She is hungry nearly all the time now, and the half-handful of nuts and dried fruit will do much to settle her stomach.

“Maria,” Altaïr says, the wary sort of still. “How are the novices?”

“Rauf is drilling them,” she reveals. The dried figs are chewy and sweet, and the flavor will linger on her breath.

“What is this?” she asks.

“Vanity,” Malik says, breaking his silence.

Altaïr scoffs without much effect, the huff of breath more akin to a particularly vigorous exhale than any protestation. His back is bare, his trousers pulled low on his hips. His skin is not a roadmap of suffering, but he has his scars, and the puckers of wounds sewn shut. That there is nothing to draw the eye in particular speaks of his skill.

“Practicality,” her husband corrects. “I cannot reach the smallest feathers, and the quartermaster and fletcher both have demands.”

An unexpected luxury of Masyaf are the down beds and pillows. She would raise a louder voice to express—not disgust, but perhaps uneasiness in the utility. Not loudly, though. She sleeps well. As for the arrows, well. She imagines it to be a point of pride for one to shoot with their own discarded feathers, and a greater one to have those of the Mentor in their quiver.

Now she sees what she mistook for another bowl of treats to be full of downy fluff. Malik resumes moving, his finger swiping across a brass tin with some waxy substance gone shallow in the middle with use, and then drag his thumb and forefinger down one of the longest plumes on the edge of Altaïr's wings. The point is restored to a knife’s sharpness, and Altaïr's shoulders sag, as if he too has been preened into sharpness.

Malik’s mouth barely twists at the corners, but she is adept at looking for it.

“Show me,” she demands, crowding in alongside against his left, their shoulders pressed together and Maria raising her hand in anticipation of guidance. “We will practice on him, and then you will let me help you.”

She smears what little stickiness the figs left on her fingers on the fabric of her pants, and leans forward as much as her belly will allow, paying close attention as Malik shows her how to pluck out the dead feathers and bring the live ones into order. There is no commentary from Altaïr.

By the third row he has fallen asleep, and she and Malik are free to indulge in low conversation on the progress of the novices while Altaïr slumbers, the breath from his nose stirring errant scattered down.

* * *

Masyaf is cold in the winter. She wraps herself in blankets and sleeps with her feet against Altaïr’s warmer thighs, but it is not enough. The addition of a warm brick at her feet does even less. She thinks of commandeering more blankets, more wood for the fire, hot tea thick with honey, anything to wrap herself in warmth and the security it brings against the encroaching season.

Altaïr acquiesces to it with grace, and deems it normal enough. He calls it nesting, and helps her arrange the cushions and rugs to her liking, a huddle that makes the best use of the corner of his rooms, and reduces Maria’s territory to how far she can walk from it before her feet soak in the cold of the uncovered stones outside it.

“Ah,” Malik says, when he finds her one morning, the mentor’s robe about her shoulders. His hand has a scroll in it; he was seeking her husband. “You have finally killed him and taken his position, I assume?”

“Yes,” Maria says, but her tongue is too thick for much else. Malik steps inside and closes the door. The scroll is discarded on a shelf as Malik goes to peer out the window. Altaïr left the curtain pulled aside when he left; Malik does her the courtesy of closing it when he is done.

“What has the midwife said?” he asks her. He does not look away from his task as he tucks the thick cloth carefully against the wall, hooking loop into the catch to ensure the wind does not rip it open.

“Soon,” she says. “A week, perhaps two. She is guessing.”

Malik squats by the fire and uses half a splintered log to shove the coals around. Exposed to the air, they glow orange, and Malik drops kindling and eventually the makeshift prod atop them

“Do you regret following him?” Malik asks, his back still to her. His tone is conversational. She even believes it.

Maria is still cold. She aches in unfamiliar ways and itches to leave the blankets even as instinct compels her to stay.

“Do you?” she asks instead. It is a weak thing, to throw the question back, clumsy, but an uncharitable part of her thinks Malik deserves it. He asked.

On his way back to the door, he takes back the letter, but he does not exit. At the edge of the nest, for she must give in to the sillier parts of herself and call it that, there is a mound of blankets kicked into something like a barrier.

“He is a fool to leave the window uncovered,” he says. “Would you like company?”

She nods. She is wary, even as he steps inside, tucking the scroll under his arm to leave his hand free. He shifts the pillows, smooths out a blanket or two, settled only by crispness. Altaïr is much the same.

Malik leaves her space when he sits, but he is still close enough to stretch the warmth of the bed, and the easy unfolding of his wings extends it further. He is still moving the pillows to build a better wall against the cold rock when he speaks, and he is nearly tender.

“I did this for my brother,” he says.  
  
Her worst enemy this entire time has been the lack of knowledge. Already, the warmth makes her drowsy.

“At least someone knows how,” she says. “Stay. Until he returns.”

“As you wish,” Malik intones, and Maria allows herself sleep, knowing he will keep his word.

* * *

It isn’t blood and shit and the slow rot of fever and dead flesh. She had seen enough women die of it to have feared it, even once she was grown and far away from her childhood home. But an egg is not a child, limbs akimbo and tethered to a mother by a cord.

It hurts. It hurts such that she cries out for her mother, even with Altaïr bracing her and the midwife under, as she asks her body to bear something to which it is not naturally suited.

There was no motion from the infant, no kicking or fluttering of limbs, and now there is no head, no wretch of shoulders, just the slow consistent push around a (fragile, breakable) shell and a midwife unfamiliar.

When it is done, and she is exhausted, fear-sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, her limbs weak, she can only lean back against Altaïr's chest and regard what she had labored so intensely for.

The shell is a uniform clay color, streaked with fluid, but that comes off with the wipe of a cloth. It is both too large and too small, and too vulnerable.

‘My child is inside there,’ she tries while she stares at it, speaking if only in her own mind, her breath slow to even out. ‘My child has an eggshell separating it from the world.’

Neither of these thoughts are comforting. Altaïr settles it in a cloth wrapping while the midwife helps Maria strip off her shift and put on a new one. She curls back into the nest of blankets with the swaddled egg near her belly, and Altaïr eases in behind her. One draped wing shields her and the egg from view. His lips rest near the knobs of the back of her neck, and she can feel him breathing.

She has time before it will hatch. Months, even, enough time for her to heal before she and Altaïr are faced with the trials of an infant. It will not be enough time for her to settle into Masyaf, but she has long been an outsider, and she can overlook the comments and the behavior of the worst offenders until her stubbornness wears a pathway into the life here.

“Maria,” Altaïr says. His words stir the hair on the back of her neck. She does not turn to look at him, and she feels him shifting. Before he can rise and upset her comfort, she speaks.

“Draw the curtains when you leave in the morning,” she says. “Or wake me before you go.”

And then she reaches out to run her fingers along the feathers above her head. He is too well-groomed for any to tumble loose, but there are errant feathers in the bedding. She tucks one against the shell, and Altaïr lays his hand over hers where she settles it next to the egg.


End file.
